Plans for the Perl 6 Hackathon in Oslo

I’m still looking for the thing I’d like to work on during the event. The first obvious thought is Bailador, the Perl 6 port of Dancer web framework. It’s getting more and more in shape, and I’ve recently started looking through the code of Dancer 2 to see how it all should be done. I really don’t want Bailador to share a fate of neutro (ie reaching a state of being a horrible, unmaintainable mess), and I feel that it’s time for it to be refactored a bit. It came to life as a 10-line module written on a piece of paper during my Spanish classes, and simply adding more and more features to it is not going to end well.

Moritz Lenz is planning to hack on database stuff, which combined with a useful and usable web framework could create a nice platform for web development in Perl 6. I’ve already heard people saying “well, I could write Perl 6 apps if it had a web framework and some database access”, so I guess it’s time to show off something suitable for web development, even simple, but usable and covering most usage scenarios.

While we’re at the Web-y stuff, one thing that we really miss is a good (or at least good-enough) templating engine. Bailador has been using Ratel for some time, yet for one it stopped working on Rakudo recently (it was probably relying on some buggy or incorrect behaviour), and it suffers the problem of having no maintainer (no one really claims ownership of it). Hitomi was to be a templating engine for the new age, so maybe it’s about time to bring it back to life in all its glory? One could definitely find something to hack on.

From the new things, but still related to web development, zby has proposed porting WebNano to Perl 6 as one of the hackathon projects. It’s not something very big, and it should be totally possible to rewrite it in Perl 6 to run on Rakudo.

Or maybe there is something you particulary want to see in Perl 6? I’m sure we’ll not lack people with tuits; what is there that could possibly make Perl 6 a useful tool for you, something that you were missing when you last looked at it?